Friends and allies of Aaron Swartz charge that overzealous prosecutors and draconian intellectual property laws drove the promising young hacker to take his own life on Friday.
Aaron accomplished more in his 26 years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetimes. At the age of 14, he helped develop the RSS standard. He was an early member of the team that created reddit, which was sold to Condé Nast… before Aaron turned 20. Now independently wealthy, Aaron threw himself into political activism.
Swartz took up the flame of copyright reform and became a leader in the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last year.
He turned hacker, and that's what led to his downfall. After breaking the paywall on PACER, the website the US judiciary uses to distribute public court records, Swartz focused on JSTOR, an electronic library of academic papers. He downloaded massive quantities of papers from the JSTOR database by accessing the MIT network using a laptop hidden in a network closet.
The action was "inconsiderate," equivalent to paying by check at the grocery store while other people are waiting behind you in line, according to Alex Stamos, CTO of Artemis Internet, who had planned to testify as an expert witness in Swartz's defense at the trial. But federal prosecutors disagreed. They charged him with multiple counts of computer hacking, wire fraud, and other crimes. If convicted on all charges, Swartz could have spent decades in prison.
Depression and suicide are complex problems. Blogger Charlie Lloyd cautioned against fitting the suicide into a narrative, such as, "It's the compassionate genius who was a little too good, or the activist hounded down by the government, or why would such a promising and beloved young person do something like this, or gosh there seems to be a link between creativity and mental illness, or some other well-meaning script."
Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
I don't have a lot to add to the outpouring of grief and outrage sweeping the Internet. I agree that depression and suicide are complex problems, and we don't know whether prosecutors drove Swartz to suicide.
On the other hand, the prospect of occupying a prison cell into middle age certainly would not have improved Swartz's mental state.
And intellectual property laws in the US are a national shame. From their original, beneficial roots as a means of encouraging creative work, intellectual property law has become a machine designed to allow businesses to continue making money long past the point of reasonableness, while hounding people with punishments disproportionate to the actual damage they committed. Hopefully, heightened awareness brought on by Swartz's suicide will drive necessary legal reforms.
mhhfive - I don't think this suicide can be blamed on the healthcare system. Swartz did well with an early investment in Reddit that made him wealthy at a young aid.
America has the greatest healthcare system in the world -- for those who can afford it. And Swartz definitely could.
I am sad that he took his own life, but I am not sure if it is all of the prosecutors fault. It seems like that he had to have some other stuff going in as well. It just seems like it takes a lot to push someone over the edge and I am sure we will never know the full story.
Thread - What harm did Thread do, that he should have deserved to be the subject of criminal prosecution -- itself a harsh punishment -- as well as a lengthy prison sentence?
In Western law, we have the principle that punishment for property crime should be proportional to the value of the damage done. One teen might soap the windows of the school, another might burn the building down. One of those teens gets sentenced to clean off the windows and pick up trash on the side of the road for a couple of days. The other kind gets hard prison time. That's justice.
The ideal is that we should leave it to countries like North Korea to throw people in prison for minor offenses.
It's probably unlikely there would have been much if any prison time given for such a crime if proven. The complexity of suicide and depression leaves a lot of uncovered ground for what would drive one to such means.
The question of what should be public domain and what should have fees attached is still a sticky one. I shouldn't think for example bankrupcy records should require the public to pay fee to see online, buy the Federal courts think otherwise.
Same for medical research and journals. Why should they not be available since many are funded in part by public dollars?
Good for you, Kim! I'm scared to start looking, having done this for so long and for so many publications over the years. But it sounds like a good rainy day project.
Alison, it can be interesting sometimes to run a search for yourself, and see what people have published without permission.
Then there's the time I reached for a book in a bookstore, and found three of my articles published without attribution. Won some damages on that one! :)
With so many content mills on the Internet, I know of several well-respected full-time freelance writers whose work has been used by this type of company, without any request to the writer or the site that originally published the work. No one received payment, either. But this is a far different topic from Swartz's situation.
Stotheco, I agree. I think the message is an important one. I understand publishers want to stay in business, but charging fees to access old articles, written by people who never received a cent; and even articles which are in the public domain but -- of course -- hard to find elsewhere. It's pretty outrageous.
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Edward Snowden was so convinced that the Prism program involved secretive surveillance through Internet backdoors that he walked out on his job and his girlfriend, spoke to the media, and resigned himself to jail, or worse. It turns out, he might just be wrong.
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Is China a threat because it censors US sites, or could it be that the country might have an economic formula that will out-innovate us on the Internet that we invented?
The US loses about $20 billion a year on pirated software, movies, and music. But public policy can help stem the tide of digital theft. For example, France has recently passed a 'three strikes and you’re out' law, whereby if after two warning letters an individual continues to download pirated software then his Internet access will be cut off. US policy makers should consider adopting similar policies.
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The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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